We've had it all here in the past month: equinox! solar eclipse! midnight blizzards in Glencoe! and finally the sun has come out and Glasgow is frolicking in t-shirts. I'm spending Easter in the big city having left Drumbuidhe to my sister and her family. I had to drive down through the Glencoe blizzard late on Tuesday last week having fitted in a rather odd village hall AGM (there was a power cut so we all sat huddled in woolly jumpers, examining the financial statement by torchlight) and then a physio session in Glasgow. I'm still suffering from the fall I had last summer and I'm aiming to strengthen my knee prior to examination and possible surgery for a torn cartilidge.
I'm also indulging in all the others joys of big city life including an excellent production of David Hare's
The Absence of War at the Citizens. I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm moved to tears by political drama. I've also been catching up on my accidental vocation for looking after and/or listening to elderly chaps. Just before Christmas I went through to Fife to try and track down my friend N whom I hadn't heard from in quite a while. Turned out he'd had a slow breakdown and was stuck in his bed being very poorly. The police broke his door down (nowhere near as dramatic as it sounds) and he was well enough to come back to Glasgow with me for Christmas and New Year. Most of N's immediate crises have been avoided: he's solvent; he's stopped wheezing; the electricity isn't going to be cut off and his garden has been cleared to allow the post to be delivered but there's a way to go before he gets a lifestyle that will work long term. However one of the great bits about having him up and functioning is that he was able to get a stack of tickets for the Edinburgh Festival when the box office opened last week. The broadband at Drumbuidhe isn't up to high-level cultural organisation. Now I have to get hold of N to check what is owed to whom and ensure he hasn't disappeared back to bed.
One of my other elderly gents is P who was a friend of my mother and is a retired lawyer with increasing mobility problems. We went together to
The Absence of War and over a picnic tea afterwards we talked about his possible move into sheltered accommodation. He mentioned that a probable cause of his balance problems was his alcoholism. When I looked surprised at this (P is currently teetotal) he told me that he'd been very miserable during the 1980s and had been drinking heavily at the time. Although this happened thirty years ago, the
neurological damage is permanent and is now manifesting itself in his problems with walking and balance. We talked 'til late about, oh crikey, the alcoholics we knew: it was a key factor in my mother's death from breast cancer; destroyed any possibility of a relationship with D and is slowly rotting my father's mind up on the west coast. I'm not sure how useful the talking was for P but I drove home (through a standard drink-sodden Saturday night in Glasgow) feeling lighter and calmer.
